The present invention relates to the field of security identification systems, and relates in particular to systems and methods for verifying the identity of persons in high volume screening applications.
Conventional systems for verifying the identity of persons typically involve either the use of highly skilled screening personnel at a large number of screening points, or involve the use of biometric analysis systems. The use of a large number of highly skilled screening personnel that compare photographic identification documents or cards with the face of the person whose identification is being verified is difficult and expensive to achieve since each screener must be highly skilled in complex personal identification techniques. The use of poorly trained screening personnel presents a dangerous false sense of security. Moreover, even with highly skilled screeners, inconsistencies between procedures used by different screeners may present further difficulties.
The use of biometric analyses standardizes and automates much of the process, but applications using biometric analyses suffer from shortcomings as well. For example, many biometric analysis systems require some human interpretation of the data to be certain in a high percentage of cases, and this interpretation may vary. Moreover, the process of obtaining reliable and consistent biometric information from a large number of persons to be identified remains difficult due to biometric data capturing concerns, particularly with non-contact biometric data capturing. Certain conventional non-contact biometric data capturing systems use video cameras to capture the faces of people in a subject area, or employ non-contact sensors to capture characteristics of parts of a person""s body. Such systems, however, remain inconsistent and insufficiently reliable, at least in part due to variations in how the subject is presented to the video camera or sensor. For facial recognition, poor lighting and poor pose angles present significant difficulties. Difficulties are also presented by having a moving subject with a fixed camera view area, particularly if the subject""s face occupies a small portion of a large and highly varying view area. Other non-contact biometric techniques include iris scanning, which requires that each subject walk up to a capture device, align themselves correctly and have their iris scanned and verified. Contact based biometric systems, such as finger print readers, are generally considered to be less safe from a health standpoint due to having a large number of persons touch the same device over a long period of time.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,119,096 discloses a system and method for automated aircraft boarding that employs iris recognition. The system, however, requires that each passenger be initially enrolled and scanned into the system. U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,739 discloses a distributed biometric personal identification system that uses fingerprint and photographic data to identify individuals. The system is disclosed to capture biometric data at workstations and to send it to a centralized server via a wide area telecommunications network for automated processing. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,544 discloses a distributed mobile biometric identification system with a centralized server and mobile workstations that uses fingerprint and photographic data to identify individuals. The system is disclosed to capture biometric data at workstations and to send it to a centralized server via a wireless network for automated processing. Each of these systems, however, may produce false positive identifications (which may overwhelm a review system) or miss certain identifications due to uncertainties in biometric data capture and/or analysis as discussed above.
There is a need, therefore, for an efficient and economical system and method that provides improved personal identity verification for a large number of persons in a high volume environment.
A security identification system is disclosed for providing information regarding subjects to be identified. In accordance with an embodiment, the system includes a biometric data input unit for receiving biometric data regarding a subject at a remote location, a biometric analysis unit, and a quality assurance unit. The biometric analysis unit is for analyzing the biometric data and comparing it against known biometric data in a database at a central facility. The biometric analysis unit is also for providing match data that is indicative of whether a match exists and whether the match is above a certain correlation threshold. The quality assurance unit is for permitting quality assurance personnel at the central facility to monitor interactions of a screener and a subject at the remote location.